EDIT - European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy -

The SPNHC (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections) conference in Leiden, July 2009 gave clear statement: There is a strong interest in the community of managers of natural history collections in Europe to come together, exchange experiences, and share advice. However, in contrast to North America where SPNHC is forming a strong and popular overall network of knowledge exchange, there is no such structure in Europe but a great variety of smaller and independent groups, e.g. based on taxonomic groups.
 
EDIT (WP3.1) is now offering the chance to investigate whether there is a broad interest in such a forum and if so which functions are considered as most important. To figure out what is needed and wanted, Clare Valentine (NHM London) and Christiane Quaisser (MfN, Berlin) set up the short questionnaire which you will find attached to this email.
 
We would herewith like to ask you to reply or to forward our questionnaire to all colleagues in your institution with hands-on experiences what concerns day-to-day collection management: collection managers, curators, heads of collections management, taxidermists etc. The more and more divers participants the better the overview.
 
Please help us in getting as complete an overview of the wishes as possible by disseminating the questionnaire and activating your colleagues to fill it in. It will just take a few minutes.
 
Completed forms should be returned to Clare Valentine, The Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum London, SW7 5BD or by e-mail: c.valentine@nhm.ac.uk if possible by 20th November 2009.
 
First results will be summarized and circulated by the end of this year. We are looking forward to your feedback, and we are really curious what will come out of it!